Maroons Throughout the Americas, African slaves would escape from the plantations on which they were forced to work. These people known to the Spanish as Cimarrones from the Spanish word "maron," meaning fierce and from the Spanish term for wild cattle. To the French they were known as Marrons, a term anglicized later to "Maroons”: the name they are referred to today. Maroons originated in Hispanola, and would runaway from their slave owners and to the mountainous terrain of most of the West Indian islands, with its forests, hidden passes, and ravines, was ideal as slave hideouts from which slaves could engage in guerilla warfare if attacked. Intermarrying with Arawak woman and allying with th